This chapter discusses Godwin's first play, St Dunstan (1790), and his best known novel, Caleb Williams (1794). St Dunstan, it is argued, was intended by Godwin as an explicit intervention into the contemporary debate over the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts and provides tangible evidence that Godwin believed in theatre as a means to effect change in public opinion. This belief in the power of theatricality permeates through to Caleb Williams, a novel whose overt use of theatrical style and allusion to contemporary judicial proceedings bolstered its narrative power and helped ensure its immediate success.

The connections between the two works will also be outlined. Firstly, a concern for history connects them: St Dunstan is representative of an eighteenth-century ideological battle over the past in order to influence the present while Caleb Williams is both Godwin's own history of ‘things as they are’ in the early 1790s and a dark presentiment of things that will be in the absence of change. Secondly, both of these texts represent Godwin's use of performative oratory, an adversarial mode of discourse designed to exploit the theatrical affect to convince the audience of the texts’ arguments. The didacticism of St Dun-stan and Caleb Williams evokes the relatively sharp distinction Godwin drew between the educated elite and the uneducated general public at this point in the 1790s.